


i am the grass; i cover all

by ERNest



Series: 15 Days of FatT 2019 [10]
Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: 15 Days of FatT, Causality, Crystal Palace (Friends at the Table), Fate & Destiny, Free Will, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Season: COUNTER/Weight, Season: Twilight Mirage, The Rapid Evening (Friends at the Table), probability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 04:38:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18113459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Day Ten: PatternsNot fate but probability; not probability but certainty; not certainty butpossibility. A time-lapsed view of a galaxy.





	i am the grass; i cover all

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Grass, by Carl Sandberg https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45034/grass-56d2245e2201c

110,000 years ago: The Divine Rigor is born of the rigor of all the people on this small and quiet planet. It may have been built by someone, too, but what matters here and now is the metaphor which allows it to use a mountain to pull itself up to standing. It looks out over the trees stretching out in perfect symmetry and it **wants** , in the way that only something very large can want something very small.

50,000 years ago: A ball is thrown into a field. Each blade of grass might be crushed, or not, but the field is large so the probability is low enough to be safe, low enough to be livable. But the ball is certain to land because again, the field is large. Rigor doesn’t care which individuals are affected as long as there is someone to do the work, and there always is. Then in the distance, far away but close enough, a star is flicked off and back on, brighter than before. All is consumed: the ball, the field, the grass, and the work.

31,000 years ago: Rigor was not killed but it was buried, and deep in the ground of an ice planet that hasn’t been discovered to be named, there is little to do but sleep. Snow falls with dizzying regularity, each flake a beautiful study in symmetry as predetermined by the physics of covalent bonds. Rigor cares not for beauty. There is only the perfect expanse of white, and what can be done with it given enough manpower. It sends out a signal which no one will hear, but which they will follow anyway.

30,000 years ago: Rigor has risen. No longer trapped under a planet of ice, it is trapped on a planet falling steadily nearer the sun. There is work to be done, and it is done. Just as Rigor knows no beauty, it also knows no boredom. First it will escape and then it will win. The outliers are easily discounted. But this, knows Addax Dawn, agent of the Rapid Evening, is its fatal flaw. Enough anomalies, enough eyes full of fire and determination, can shift the distribution and change the pattern entirely until they are not incongruities at all, but the simple truth. In dismissing this data immediately and unthinkingly, Rigor will never know how many outliers there really are.

28,000 years ago: The Rapid Evening and the Principality of Kesh have had their dawn and no one outside of them even noticed it happening. For all that progress it is an evening land, never brighter than half-light and shades of darkness allow. But Crystal Palace, oh Crystal Palace! How it distills that dimness into clarity, that transparent beacon, how it shines! The sentences must then be sifted through, but after that, the wavelengths of truth are _known_.

30 years ago: A father explains that the future is a field of poppies. Everyone knows that the deep red of predictions is unblemished and all but endless, that truth is truth is truth. Keen Forester-Gloaming is not everyone. It _is_ true that the closer Crystal Palace gets to events, the more accurate and immutable its statements become. But the closer _you_  get to the center of Crystal Palace, the less monolithic its output. The machine is never wrong, of course, but its employees can be, so they must work constantly to turn everything at once into something that can be used. Someone gets tired or someone else favors left over right, which is how you get bent stems or a flower of a different color. And _that_  only reinforces that the field will always be the field, and its flaws are far apart.

9 months ago: A dinner party ends explosively, each guest and some of the hosts splintering off to serve different factions and interests. Up ‘til now they have all been free agents in the indifferent eyes of the universe, if not in the small scale politics of the Quire System. Few people in the Mirage knew that they were being watched in the first place and only a few more knew when Dark Day arrived. Something clicks and whirs as the view shifts from one former member of the Notion to the next, to the next. Their faces are never seen, just their backs as each one walks to their destination, like the introduction to a movie. And it is. One screen becomes two, two screens become four, 8, 16, 32, 64, unrelenting exponents until there is a wall of screens, and making them work is a sea of agents from the Rapid Evening. Crystal Palace is live, and this time _no one_  knows it.

Now: A daughter who has never felt that she belongs in the regular rows of calculations grows up. In this field of stars and pink and purple light, she sees all of the flaws and unforeseeable events, which are so few and far between everywhere else, gathered together. They don’t need to predict their future, because they can _make_  it together. Standing in the garden she’s finally found for herself, Gray Gloaming can’t help grinning.


End file.
